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Where have all the insects gone?

sciencemag.org

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Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#71

Post by sqeaky »

arethuza wrote: post #56
jostmey wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This belief that nature has control over the planet is sadly mistaken. If humanity wanted to, it could nuke the planet eliminating all insect life. Humanity has invented things far beyond the reach of nature and far beyond what nature can cope with.

"it could nuke the planet eliminating all insect life" We'd have to spend a while building a supply of big cobalt-salted bombs because the nuclear arsenals we've actually had have come nowhere near to the level required to wipe out all people let alone all insects.

This is just entirely untrue. We have plenty of nuclear warheads, enough to nuke the thousand most populated cities several times over. All humanity would be dead or dying. those not killed immediately have to deal with fallout and new weather patterns caused by huge amounts of dust blocking the sky.

It is conceivable a few might live, but it is also entirely possible the survivors would be too irradiated to sustain a breeding populations. Vast plant populations would die off, only those not directly blasted and able to survive a few years of artificial global winter survive. This presumes the dust is also non-reflective, because if it lowers the Earth's albedo enough it could trigger an ice age. If that happens then pretty much no individuals survive the triple threat of nuclear blasting, perpetual winter and loss of vegetation, unless they have some uncommon radiation resistance and incredibly low nutrition requirements. In this last paragraph was I talking about humans or insects? Doesn't matter; the cost of nuclear war is too high for us to talk about it lightly, because it is an awesome power that can destroy us if used lightly.

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#72

Post by darkerside »

phkahler wrote: post #60
rojobuffalo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a very troubling signal. But I wonder if over 24 years, some insects have developed trap avoidance.

Particularly those in the areas of the traps :-)

Their evolution lifecycle would be vastly quicker than ours

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#73

Post by Xeoncross »

notadoc wrote: post #63

> No one can prove that the pesticides are to blame for the decline, however. No one can prove that insecticides are responsible for killing insects? If only someone would do some sort of study on this, or perhaps if we somehow had some way to know the purpose or function of pesticides and insecticides.

Ask the right people and "Pesticides can also improve the nutritional value of food..." - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3108117/

Pesticides contain warnings about being carcinogenic, related to brain and heart failure, harmful to children, deadly to pets, harmful to plants, and destroys helpful bacteria.

But other than that, it's part of a balanced breakfast.

Reminds me of the "firefighters" in fahrenheit 451

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#74

Post by throwaway423447 »

notadoc wrote: post #63

> No one can prove that the pesticides are to blame for the decline, however. No one can prove that insecticides are responsible for killing insects? If only someone would do some sort of study on this, or perhaps if we somehow had some way to know the purpose or function of pesticides and insecticides.

... and two minutes later the name of the brave person will be manure. Not because one's egregiously wrong, not because of lack of ethics, but because it'll be affecting many powerful people and their emissaries in the academia. Common story in the GMO industry. Oh, and it doesn't hurt to be prepared for all the ad hominem hit pieces: "Left loony" "commie" "anti-science" ...

The conquering grounds for the corporatocracy is also the developing world, a place which naively swallows whatever any of the reigning superpowers throw at it (hint: India is not/never will be a superpower). Very sad this.

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#75

Post by [deleted] »

flowersoldier wrote: post #68
ashark wrote: post #9

Interesting. So maybe it wasn't just my imagination. I remember butterflies being everywhere in Spring in this area when I was a kid. Fields and air full of 'em for weeks. Monarchs especially, but all kinds. I haven't seen that kind of thing even once in probably a decade, at least. And the windshield thing. I hadn't really thought about it, but I remember my parents having to scrape the windshield just about every g…

I've noticed a decline in Monarchs here in Northern California as well. The very few I do see are colored differently than when I was a kid. They used to be a deep orange hue, but now they are all a pasty yellow color. At first I thought it was a different species. I've mentioned it to other people, but they don't really care. They're more interested in upgrading their cell phone or checking their instabook.

[deleted]

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#76

Post by Daishiman »

jballanc wrote: post #21
Daishiman wrote: post #13

So when will people stop minimizing that, literally, the planet is dying?

The planet isn't dying. The planet is just a ball of rock running loops around the gravity well of the closest star. We are, however, in the midst of the sixth great extinction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction . The evidence for this is pretty dang convincing, even independent of things like global climate change, and it has been going on for quite a while now, starting with the disappearance of meg…

For the person on the street who does not even care about the details of ocean acidification or atmospheric CO2 concentrations, "the planet is dying" is a sufficiently strong and useful statement.

You're doing exactly what I'm saying playing with semantics. For all intents and purposes on the timescales that we actually care about, the planet is dying.

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#77

Post by Daishiman »

jballanc wrote: post #21
Daishiman wrote: post #13

So when will people stop minimizing that, literally, the planet is dying?

The planet isn't dying. The planet is just a ball of rock running loops around the gravity well of the closest star. We are, however, in the midst of the sixth great extinction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction . The evidence for this is pretty dang convincing, even independent of things like global climate change, and it has been going on for quite a while now, starting with the disappearance of meg…

For the person on the street who does not even care about the details of ocean acidification or atmospheric CO2 concentrations, "the planet is dying" is a sufficiently strong and useful statement.

You're doing exactly what I'm saying playing with semantics. For all intents and purposes on the timescales that we actually care about, the planet is dying.

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#78

Post by lolsal »

notadoc wrote: post #63

> No one can prove that the pesticides are to blame for the decline, however. No one can prove that insecticides are responsible for killing insects? If only someone would do some sort of study on this, or perhaps if we somehow had some way to know the purpose or function of pesticides and insecticides.

The claim was that the generic actor 'pesticides' could not be proven to be the cause of the general decline for these specific tests and locations. No one was asserting that insecticides could not be proven to be responsible for killing insects.

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#79

Post by purephase »

Lordarminius wrote: post #61

I thought I was the only one to notice this. When I was a kid there were a ton of grasshoppers around. Now kids don't even know what they are. A related observation I have made is that ALL the frogs have disappeared leaving only toads. I recall reading somewhere that this is due to UV radiation that kills off the eggs. Its going to be a silent planet soon

Yeah, you're spot on. Grasshoppers and frogs were everywhere in the 80's when I was a kid. I can't remember the last time I even saw a grasshopper.

Not sure if it's related, but I rarely see dew any more either.

Re: Where have all the insects gone?

#80

Post by Xeoncross »

lolsal wrote: post #78
notadoc wrote: post #63

> No one can prove that the pesticides are to blame for the decline, however. No one can prove that insecticides are responsible for killing insects? If only someone would do some sort of study on this, or perhaps if we somehow had some way to know the purpose or function of pesticides and insecticides.

The claim was that the generic actor 'pesticides' could not be proven to be the cause of the general decline for these specific tests and locations. No one was asserting that insecticides could not be proven to be responsible for killing insects.

The statement is very amusing though since vast sections of our country use pesticides for their intended purpose. It is not hard to find pesticide traces in every part of our country. Especially near cities where almost every landscape and pond is sprayed.

On the coast it is very common to see "foggers" driving around spraying pesticides in the air hoping to flood the area with enough chemicals to kill all the mosquitoes.

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